INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Independent Russian media outlet Mediazona said Saturday more than 66,000 Russian military personnel have died during the war in Ukraine
according to its estimates.Mediazona has been drawing up a list of known soldier deaths in conjunction with the BBC Russian Service using
open-source data.Previously in April, they announced they had found more than 50,000 names of Russians killed.Mediazona said Saturday that
while stressing this was not a definitive figure since many soldiers' deaths are not made public.Anastasia Alekseyeva, a journalist at
Mediazona, stressed that the latest death numbers were "not linked to Ukraine's offensive in the Kursk region or Russia's advance in the
national service have been killed in the war, with the highest figures in early months.However these figures may be inexact since conscripts
can sign professional army contracts and some may have done so without telling relatives, Mediazona editor Dmitry Treshchanin said.According
has a large Muslim population.The most represented age group overall was 33-35 (6,877 deaths).More than 12,000 of the dead were prisoners,
after Russia sought to recruit inmates by promising them freedom after a period on the front line.But numbers have dropped recently,
since February 2022, using open-source information from official reports and the media, as well as using satellite images of Russian
cemeteries to estimate the number of new graves.Russian President Vladimir Putin said in June that almost 700,0000 Russian soldiers were
ministry in September 2022 said 5,937 soldiers had been killed in combat.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in February that 31,000
Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in the first two years of the war.
